"Can you feel me?"
A pause. He opens the jar, dips two fingers in, and presses the salve against my sternum where the rebound hit hardest. It's cold and smells like winter and something darker underneath. "Yes," he says.
"So the ritual didn't sever it. It cracked it open further."
"That's one way to describe what you did to yourself, yes."
I look at the side of his face. He's working with his eyes down, jaw tight, the set of his shoulders that means he's holding something back by sheer force of will. And through the bond, there it is again. That fear. Not abstract. Sharp and specific, the kind that has a name attached to it.
"You were scared," I say. "When you found me."
"I found a student unconscious next to a botched severance circle. The appropriate response involves some level of urgency."
"That's not what I said."
He presses the cloth over the salve and holds it there, and the pressure is steady and careful and I can feel through theopen bond that his hands want to shake and he won't let them. "Don't," he says. Quiet. Not a command.
"Ryder."
"Drop it, Fairmont."
"I can feel it. I'm not guessing."
He sits on the edge of the bed and doesn't move his hands, and the fire in the grate pops and settles, and the room is quiet enough that I can hear him breathe. He breathes like someone making a decision.
"You scared me," he says finally. "Yes. Are you satisfied?"
"No. Because that's not actually what I was asking."
His eyes come up. This close, with the bond between us running at full capacity, his face is exactly what I suspected it was during the ball, when I thought I could see more of it than usual. The walls are still there. But the bond makes gaps in them.
"What were you asking?" he says.
"Why you care. When you've spent most of this semester making sure I knew you didn't."
The silence that follows is long enough to make me think he won't answer. He takes the cloth away, checks the skin underneath, replaces it.
"Because I knew," he says. "About the prophecy. Before you arrived."
I don't move. "How long before."
"Long enough." He doesn't look away this time. "I knew what you were before the sorting. I knew what the bond would mean if it formed. And I knew that a Conduit drawn into three bonds while the Veil was already weakening had a life expectancy that the council was not going to prioritize over political stability."
"So you decided to make my life difficult."
"I decided that if you were terrified of me, you'd keep your distance. If you kept your distance, the bond might not seat fully.If the bond didn't seat, you'd have one less thing pulling you toward the center of something that tends to kill people."
I stare at him. "That's the worst plan I've ever heard."
"It wasn't a plan. It was improvisation under pressure."
"Improvisation that involved making me feel like garbage on a fairly consistent basis."
His jaw tightens. "I know."
"You know," I repeat. "That's it? That's the follow-up to telling me you've been cruel to me on purpose as some kind of protection strategy that you knew wasn't working?"
"What would you like me to say?"
